Warren Beishir
Mar 28, 2009
He has the gift of pressure expertise, using weight of his pen to depict personal connection to urban decay. Warren interjects his learned, rigid structural renderings with an organic architecture of intersecting lines, a series of shapes that form an almost divine, and hazardous, environment. The break from very literal imagery along with his purposeful lack of details seems to me, a necessary outpouring of detest for our modern day build-it-fast-and-cheap-without-considering-history attitude. Warren’s dedication to this type of subjectivity keeps him walking the streets of Brooklyn, where I found him early this week.
How much time do you invest into a piece?
It depends, when it’s flowing I can get one out in six to eight hours. If it’s more intense, or a commission where someone’s trying to convey a certain thing, then two to three days. Six to eighteen hours.
And how do you begin?
The first part of of my process is getting things together – put my camping chair on my back and start hiking around places in Brooklyn in search of places I’ve seen before, or I’ll just randomly go to a new neighborhood or a place that the city has deemed necessary to tear down. I basically focus on places in New York, Brooklyn, that are being overly gentrified or very quickly redeveloped. Where people are losing their homes, or the face of the neighborhood is changing drastically either from low income slums to high rises, or from Coney Island to shitty amusement park to whatever. Right now its just a big bull dozed site, we’ll see what happens. So anyways, I grab my chair and hike and I’m drawn to, usually, industrial type places, like I said. Places in visual or societal deterioration. I plop down in front of what ever looks interesting to me and start drawing.
I don’t draw perspectives like most people do, I draw a sort of pattern, like what I’m seeing is a quilt with different shapes. I break it down into simplistic shapes – that’s a square next to a weird triangle, next to an oval. I keep drawing these shapes that are sticking together and then my cityscapes start to take shape. I leave a lot out of my drawing. I want the shapes to fit together in a very organic way. I guess form the days when I was studying architecture, I brought in use of line weight to show depth.
How does that work for you?
Most of my drawings have have a ton of depth to them, but it’s not created by light or tone, its created by line and pattern. Say there’s a drawing with flags in it, I might leave out a whole lot of details but there will be flags in the same sort of orientation down the street, and so they’re all the same shape. If you can identify one of them as a flag, your eye tells you all those shapes are flags. I don’t project perspective points, I’m strictly working with sticking shapes together.
How did you do initially, transitioning into the big city?
I grew up in quiets suburbs in Saint Louis and I really wasn’t working the same way. I started drawing when I got to New York. Most of the stuff I did when I was that age was not… comic book inspired, because I wasn’t into comics that much, but maybe cartoon inspired. Very colorful and distorted, almost a mix of Thomas Hart Benton and Frank Gehry, who’s very popular now.
I did people and landscapes and places but nothing had a rigorous perspective to it, and it almost look like you were seeing it through a fish eye lens. Benton did these country scenes, very colorful, spaces flowing in and out of each other.
Do you still experiment with your medium?
Well not in all the ways I would like to, but I’m experimenting by taking my drawings and producing them on different surfaces. I’m working towards, instead of fine art, using my drawings as a sort of branding. I just did a whole group of decorative tiles and coasters and I’m working on lampshades. Actually, one of those was just featured in the magazine House Beautiful. I’ve never heard of it, but people say they’ve seen it so it must be out there.
What was your experience at art school, SVA?
This dude Matt you might know made me drink too much! My nicest thing to say about art school would be the people that I went to school with, my peers. They are inspiring and inspired. Don’t get me wrong, just because you’re a great artist doesn’t mean your a great teacher, that goes for me too. Some people were meant to paint pictures all day and not say a fucking word about it. So my experience at art school was that I learned the most from the people I was there with.
I went to school where luckily, people were coming from all sorts of professional situations and pursuits. Architects, teachers, artists, doctors, writers and musicians all wanting to paint pictures and tell a story, and that was really cool.
I hear that you made a book for the blind that my cohort was impressed by some years ago.
No one’s ever looked at that! One of our projects was Darkness/Light, so each of us dealt with that in our own way, from our own perspective. Sometimes I get overly conceptual about stuff, but I tried to break it down and say, ‘what’s the simplest thing I could do? Well, if you don’t have light, you can’t see shit and I would think that would have a pretty big impact on visual information.’ So I thought I could make a book with pictures using textures so someone who is blind could see it as well.
I volunteered at this sort of housing co-op for blind people where they have all sorts of activities and their own in-house radio station. They had karate classes, I got my ass whooped in chess by a blind guy about ten times until he was sick of beating the crap out of me. So I got involved with these folks and I’d hang out, play chess, talk music, spin records and ask them stupid questions. I learned a lot and the unfortunate part of that was, I really wasn’t able to capture what I learned very well, pictorially.
I created some images, I made my own brail, the subways systems of New York, pictures from different books that were about blindness or people who were blind. I read some great books, Cathedral by Raymond Carver. I read some horrible books like Blindness by Jose Saramago. I guess in the end, I was disappointed still with how the book came out, while I learned some amazing things. Like how does a blind person tell a twenty dollar bill from a one dollar bill? They would come from the bank knowing, or go to a place where they trusted people and they’d ask someone, or they have these readers that cost hundreds of dollars. They put the bill into it and it tells them what it is. The way they would do it was to fold each bill amount a different way. Maybe you have a twenty, so you fold it in half, a ten could be folded into quarter. Strange little tricks to life. I’m just a perfectionist for whatever reason, so that’s good and terrible. It’s been a theme throughout my artistic career, and life in general.
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eh…he’s ok